Cohen's Means

by Editor
January 29, 2015 at 2:53 pm

http://www.smartertimes.com/1349/cohen-means

"Scholars at Odds on Ukraine" is the headline over a New York Times article that begins:

Since the crisis in Ukraine began, the Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen has cast himself in the role of the unbowed dissenter, whose sharp criticisms of America's foreign policy in the region have earned him denunciations as "Putin's American toady," as The New Republic put it, and worse.

But Mr. Cohen is also a man of means, whose wife's charitable foundation has donated large amounts of money to support Russian studies, which have been hard hit by declining government funding.

The Times doesn't explain the source of Mr. Cohen's means. His wife is the editor and publisher of The Nation mgazine, Katrina vanden Heuvel. Wikipedia says she is the granddaughter of Jules C. Stein, the founder of the movie company MCA. She's also a big advocate of the estate tax. Probably one of the best arguments for the estate tax is that it would prevent people like Ms. Vanden Heuvel from using her grandfather's money to promote her husband's blame-America-first view of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But I am a big believer in private property rights and in the idea that, as a general matter and on a net basis, families are better allocators of capital than the politicians in Washington are. So notwithstanding the Stein-vanden Heuvel-Cohen clan's best efforts to make the case for the estate tax with their own actions, I'm going to stick with my view of it and chalk them up as exceptions that prove the rule.

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